Summary: Demystifying Configuration Challenges and Trade-Offs
in Network-based ISP Services
Theophilus Benson, Aditya Akella
University of Wisconsin, Madison
Madison, WI, USA
{tbenson, akella}@cs.wisc.edu
Aman Shaikh
AT&T Labs ­ Research
Florham Park, NJ, USA
ashaikh@research.att.com
ABSTRACT
ISPs are increasingly offering a variety of network-based services
such as VPN, VPLS, VoIP, Virtual-Wire and DDoS protection. Al-
though both enterprise and residential networks are rapidly adopt-
ing these services, there is little systematic work on the design chal-
lenges and trade-offs ISPs face in providing them. The goal of our
paper is to understand the complexity underlying the layer-3 de-
sign of services and to highlight potential factors that hinder their
introduction, evolution and management. Using daily snapshots of
configuration and device metadata collected from a tier-1 ISP, we